I rose from my cotton cocoon and rubbed my eyes. Best put on some pants. I opened the door and was reminded of that clogged lavatory on the last flight. I took the few steps over to Casey’s room, the door fully open, and peeked. Babies were entirely new to me, and I already had that awful track record with youngsters, so I was taking this one careful step at a time. I leaned in and the crying immediately stopped. In her crib, soiled cloth diaper off to a corner, Casey smiled the moment she saw me. Finally, she guessed, someone had arrived to put things right. Someone would rid her of this foul frosting she’d transformed into finger paint. Her handiwork marked the wooden bars of her crib, the wall adjacent, her little limbs and a, to a small degree, her face. I was relieved that the sight of me made Casey smile, but it’s not as though I was about to touch her, or even step close for fear she might have a tiny chunk of poop for flinging. I’d already learned that lesson watching a small monkey in the Paris zoo take aim at Dora. Unh-unh. Turning toward the hall, and the rest of the large house, with its echo-y marble stairway and foyer, I gave a tentative shout. “Dad!” No answer. I looked back to Casey, whose smile was giving way to some tension. “Why isn’t he doing anything worthwhile to get me out of this stinking mess,” she surely wondered in a baby’s language. “Just help me!” Sorry. That’s not going to happen. Not only may I inadvertently hurt you, it would be the first time in my knowledge that I would’ve touched excrement, something I’d managed to avoid for many years; grateful for no memory of the instance, so my father said, of inserting my finger into a goat’s anus at a San Diego petting zoo. I stepped outside the room, farther into the hallway. “Dad? Robin?” My voice bounced through the house. There in that limbo I remained, one foot in Casey’s room, one in the hallway, trying to keep a sort of smile on Casey’s face, listening for any signs of life in the rest of the house. It seemed to take ages, but was probably just a few minutes till I heard the front door open. Dad, seeming chipper, came up the stairs and saw me standing in Casey’s doorway at the end of the hall.

    “She pulled her diaper off,” I said, feeling sort of foolish. But better to feel foolish than to cover my hands in shit. I hadn’t yet grasped that I had months of diaper changing ahead of me. Obie chuckled and marched past me, amused. He gallantly swept Casey up – though keeping her at arm’s length – and carried her over to the bathroom. Into the tub she went for an immediate hose-down, made so convenient when seemingly every society on Earth but America’s maintains shower wands as standard.